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Jun. 18th, 2004 01:54 pm
Trees of my Childhood: Black Cherry
If there's an emerging theme unifying these entries, it's "trees that drop shit." Given how tactile children are, how engaged they are with their environment, it's not surprising that the plants most salient in my memory are those we interacted with, whether by climbing, picking, eating, or playing with.
There was a black cherry in our back yard on Dale Avenue. It was right up against the fence (built by my father, IIRC) separating our property from that of a kindly elderly woman, whose window I once inadvertently egged, and almost entirely surrounded by asphalt. It was also our climbing tree, the only one in the yard sturdy enough to hold us yet also accessible enough to be reached by the stunted lawn monkeys we were back then. One year, when we got a new appliance (a dishwasher?), we put the box on the driveway and took turns jumping into from the lowest branch. I don't know why it should hurt less jumping onto four millimetres of corrugated cardboard atop pavement rather than directly onto the blacktop itself, but it did.
I don't have strong memories of the little white blossoms that must've appeared in the spring, but I remember well the tiny purplish-black fruits that followed them. To my dismay, since I really liked cherries, these were strictly bird food. (One site I came across calls them "relatively taseless, neither sweet nor sour." Bullshit. They tasted nasty.) They're also so small, about the size of peas, that I didn't recognise them as cherries until I looked up what kind of tree it was. You could toss them by handful, like birdshot, which gave us athletic hopelesses the chance of hitting each other with them at least some of the time. One year, I picked so many that I filled a mason jar with them and left it on dresser. Months later, when I unscrewed it, I found that there had been enough moisture in them for some serious fermentation. In other words: They stunk to high heaven. In that respect, it was a child science experiment as successful as leaving a cup of milk on my windowsill for weeks on end.
I don't know what their range is, but I don't remember seeing more black cherries after this one, either elsewhere in Missouri or here in Chicago, outside of botanical gardens. A shame, really, since they attract a lot of birds. (For that reason, I tried putting the bluebird nest I made with my father under that tree, but it fell off the fence and broke before anything tried to nest in it.) But they're probably not showy enough for most folks.
There was a black cherry in our back yard on Dale Avenue. It was right up against the fence (built by my father, IIRC) separating our property from that of a kindly elderly woman, whose window I once inadvertently egged, and almost entirely surrounded by asphalt. It was also our climbing tree, the only one in the yard sturdy enough to hold us yet also accessible enough to be reached by the stunted lawn monkeys we were back then. One year, when we got a new appliance (a dishwasher?), we put the box on the driveway and took turns jumping into from the lowest branch. I don't know why it should hurt less jumping onto four millimetres of corrugated cardboard atop pavement rather than directly onto the blacktop itself, but it did.I don't have strong memories of the little white blossoms that must've appeared in the spring, but I remember well the tiny purplish-black fruits that followed them. To my dismay, since I really liked cherries, these were strictly bird food. (One site I came across calls them "relatively taseless, neither sweet nor sour." Bullshit. They tasted nasty.) They're also so small, about the size of peas, that I didn't recognise them as cherries until I looked up what kind of tree it was. You could toss them by handful, like birdshot, which gave us athletic hopelesses the chance of hitting each other with them at least some of the time. One year, I picked so many that I filled a mason jar with them and left it on dresser. Months later, when I unscrewed it, I found that there had been enough moisture in them for some serious fermentation. In other words: They stunk to high heaven. In that respect, it was a child science experiment as successful as leaving a cup of milk on my windowsill for weeks on end.
I don't know what their range is, but I don't remember seeing more black cherries after this one, either elsewhere in Missouri or here in Chicago, outside of botanical gardens. A shame, really, since they attract a lot of birds. (For that reason, I tried putting the bluebird nest I made with my father under that tree, but it fell off the fence and broke before anything tried to nest in it.) But they're probably not showy enough for most folks.
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